Courage Over Fear

What does it take to have courage over fear? I said in Hustle Believe Receive that; “fear is the enemy of success.” I believe that to be true because of the incredible power most people give it, whether they recognize it or not. But I think fear also holds one important role in our lives, and that is to make us question our decisions. It forces us to vet all the possibilities before rushing into a potentially life changing choice.

The key is to make sure fear knows its place in your world. Don’t give it more power or more credit than it deserves and definitely don’t allow it to be your guiding force behind making decisions. It is simply a tool in our box that can help us make decisions where we’ve looked at all possible repercussions of that decision.

It takes courage to live the life you really dream of living. It takes immense courage to follow your dream and find success. Courage comes into play every time fear threatens our dreams. Fear is the devil on our shoulder making us look at all those nasty worst case scenarios; so look at them! Stare them down. Could you still live with yourself if one of those “worst case” hypothetical situations happened? Then there’s your answer, fear did its job and now its time to turn the wheel back over to courage.

There’s this HUGE lie being told to us, that when you follow your passion, things should just flow naturally. I’m not sure who started this dangerous and disgusting rumor, but let me tell you from first hand experience that it’s NOT true. Things don’t just magically “work out” even when you’re in “the flow” of following your dream. There is ALWAYS fear. There are always forks in the road that require you to RISK something, and to do that you need #CourageOverFear.

There is nothing magical about success. Instead it is a formula and the ability to put that formula into action over and over again, to trust it. In that process you begin to trust your gut, or intuition, or whatever you want to call it, it’s your ultimate compass as you navigate your next move. If you follow THAT then you will always be in good hands.

The job of our intuition is to protect us from harm, but most people spend all their time fighting that quiet inner voice. They find a million ways to talk themselves out of whatever direction their gut is telling them to take, then they chose the path based in fear, ignoring intuition and fall right into harms way. If we just took the time to listen to our gut in the first place it would help us find that balance between fear and courage, and in the end it would strengthen courage enough for us to make the right choices.

If you look back on your life at the moments/choices that changed your life, I bet you will discover that you were faced with fear, but instead of giving into it you applied courage and took a leap of faith which resulted in those big decisions.

So if you are facing a big choice in your life; maybe its leaving a job you hate, starting a business, leaving a bad relationship… whatever it is, stop letting fear talk you out of making the choice that your intuition is begging you to make. Listen to it. Then put your big girl (or boy!) pants on and take the leap of faith!